A party, 101 princesses and an eccentric millionaire: Jon Ronson on a mysterious castle – and what it taught him about masculinity in crisis

When my son texted me from a Connecticut fortress in the middle of the night with an alarming message, it set me on a quest to understand the bizarre lifestyle of its owner I awoke one morning in the summer of 2023 to discover that, while I’d slept, my son Joel had been texting my wife and me a series of unnerving messages about a perilous situation he had found himself in, in Connecticut.

From what I could tell, as I frantically tried to piece together the night’s events, one of Joel’s friends had been invited to a party being held by a stranger she’d met that week on Tinder.

So Joel and two others went along for the ride.

But when they arrived, they found the man’s home so bizarre that Joel did something he’d never done before – he sent me the coordinates of his location and a photograph, just in case.

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